AMPERSAND

The right to the name of Ampersand, like the territory of Gaul in those

_Commentaries_ which Julius Cæsar wrote for the punishment of

school-boys, is divided into three parts. It belongs to a mountain, and

a lake, and a little river.

The mountain stands in the heart of the Adirondack country, just near

enough to the thoroughfare of travel for thousands of people to see it

every year, and just far enough from the beaten track to be unvisited

except by a very few of the wise ones, who love to turn aside. Behind

the mountain is the lake, which no lazy man has ever seen. Out of the

lake flows the stream, winding down a long, untrodden forest valley, to

join the Stony Creek waters and empty into the Raquette River.

Which of the three Ampersands has the prior claim to the name, I cannot

tell. Philosophically speaking, the mountain ought to be regarded as the

head of the family, because it was undoubtedly there before the others.

And the lake was probably the next on the ground, because the stream is

its child. But man is not strictly just in his nomenclature; and I

conjecture that the little river, the last-born of the three, was the

first to be christened Ampersand, and then gave its name to its parent

and grand-parent. It is such a crooked stream, so bent and curved and

twisted upon itself, so fond of turning around unexpected corners and

sweeping away in great circles from its direct course, that its first

explorers christened it after the eccentric supernumerary of the

alphabet which appears in the old spelling-books as _&_—and _per se_,

and.

But in spite of this apparent subordination to the stream in the matter

of a name, the mountain clearly asserts its natural authority. It stands

up boldly; and not only its own lake, but at least three others, the

Lower Saranac, Round Lake, and Lonesome Pond, lie at its foot and

acknowledge its lordship. When the cloud is on its brow, they are dark.

When the sunlight strikes it, they smile. Wherever you may go over the

waters of these lakes you shall see Mount Ampersand looking down at you,

and saying quietly, “This is my domain.”

I never look at a mountain which asserts itself in this fashion without

desiring to stand on the top of it. If one can reach the summit, one

becomes a sharer in the dominion. The difficulties in the way only add

to the zest of the victory. Every mountain is, rightly considered, an

invitation to climb. And as I was resting for a month one summer at

Bartlett’s, Ampersand challenged me daily.

Did you know Bartlett’s in its palmy time? It was the homeliest,

quaintest, coziest place in the Adirondacks. Away back in the

_ante-bellum_ days Virgil Bartlett had come into the woods, and built

his house on the bank of the Saranac River, between the Upper Saranac

and Round Lake. It was then the only dwelling within a circle of many

miles. The deer and bear were in the majority. At night one could

sometimes hear the scream of the panther or the howling of wolves. But

soon the wilderness began to wear the traces of a conventional smile.

The desert blossomed a little—if not as the rose, at least as the

gilly-flower. Fields were cleared, gardens planted; half a dozen log

cabins were scattered along the river; and the old house, having grown

slowly and somewhat irregularly for twenty years, came out, just before

the time of which I write, in a modest coat of paint and a broad-brimmed

piazza. But Virgil himself, the creator of the oasis—well known of

hunters and fishermen, dreaded of lazy guides and quarrelsome

lumbermen,—“Virge,” the irascible, kind-hearted, indefatigable, was

there no longer. He had made his last clearing, and fought his last

fight; done his last favour to a friend, and thrown his last adversary

out of the tavern door. His last log had gone down the river. His

camp-fire had burned out. Peace to his ashes. His wife, who had often

played the part of Abigail toward travellers who had unconsciously

incurred the old man’s mistrust, now reigned in his stead; and there was

great abundance of maple-syrup on every man’s flapjack.

The charm of Bartlett’s for the angler was the stretch of rapid water in

front of the house. The Saranac River, breaking from its first

resting-place in the Upper Lake, plunged down through a great bed of

rocks, making a chain of short falls and pools and rapids, about half a

mile in length. Here, in the spring and early summer, the speckled

trout—brightest and daintiest of all fish that swim—used to be found in

great numbers. As the season advanced, they moved away into the deep

water of the lakes. But there were always a few stragglers left, and I

have taken them in the rapids at the very end of August. What could be

more delightful than to spend an hour or two, in the early morning or

evening of a hot day, in wading this rushing stream, and casting the fly

on its clear waters? The wind blows softly down the narrow valley, and

the trees nod from the rocks above you. The noise of the falls makes

constant music in your ears. The river hurries past you, and yet it is

never gone.

The same foam-flakes seem to be always gliding downward, the same spray

dashing over the stones, the same eddy coiling at the edge of the pool.

Send your fly in under those cedar branches, where the water swirls

around by that old log. Now draw it up toward the foam. There is a

sudden gleam of dull gold in the white water. You strike too soon. Your

line comes back to you. In a current like this, a fish will almost

always hook himself. Try it again. This time he takes the fly fairly,

and you have him. It is a good fish, and he makes the slender rod bend

to the strain. He sulks for a moment as if uncertain what to do, and

then with a rush darts into the swiftest part of the current. You can

never stop him there. Let him go. Keep just enough pressure on him to

hold the hook firm, and follow his troutship down the stream as if he

were a salmon. He slides over a little fall, gleaming through the foam,

and swings around in the next pool. Here you can manage him more easily;

and after a few minutes’ brilliant play, a few mad dashes for the

current, he comes to the net, and your skilful guide lands him with a

quick, steady sweep of the arm. The scales credit him with an even

pound, and a better fish than this you will hardly take here in

midsummer.

“On my word, master,” says the appreciative Venator, in Walton’s

_Angler_, “this is a gallant trout; what shall we do with him?” And

honest Piscator, replies: “Marry! e’en eat him to supper; we’ll go to my

hostess from whence we came; she told me, as I was going out of door,

that my brother Peter, [and who is this but Romeyn of Keeseville?] a

good angler and a cheerful companion, had sent word he would lodge there

to-night, and bring a friend with him. My hostess has two beds, _and I

know you and I have the best_; we’ll rejoice with my brother Peter and

his friend, tell tales, or sing ballads, or make a catch, or find some

harmless sport to content us, and pass away a little time without

offence to God or man.”

Ampersand waited immovable while I passed many days in such innocent and

healthful pleasures as these, until the right day came for the ascent.

Cool, clean, and bright, the crystal morning promised a glorious noon,

and the mountain almost seemed to beckon us to come up higher. The

photographic camera and a trustworthy lunch were stowed away in the

pack-basket. The backboard was adjusted at a comfortable angle in the

stern seat of our little boat. The guide held the little craft steady

while I stepped into my place; then he pushed out into the stream, and

we went swiftly down toward Round Lake.

A Saranac boat is one of the finest things that the skill of man has

ever produced under the inspiration of the wilderness. It is a frail

shell, so light that a guide can carry it on his shoulders with ease,

but so dexterously fashioned that it rides the heaviest waves like a

duck, and slips through the water as if by magic. You can travel in it

along the shallowest rivers and across the broadest lakes, and make

forty or fifty miles a day, if you have a good guide.

Everything depends, in the Adirondacks, as in so many other regions of

life, upon your guide. If he is selfish, or surly, or stupid, you will

have a bad time. But if he is an Adirondacker of the best old-fashioned

type,—now unhappily growing more rare from year to year,—you will find

him an inimitable companion, honest, faithful, skilful and cheerful. He

is as independent as a prince, and the gilded youths and finicking fine

ladies who attempt to patronise him are apt to make but a sorry show

before his solid and undisguised contempt. But deal with him man to man,

and he will give you a friendly, loyal service which money cannot buy,

and teach you secrets of woodcraft and lessons in plain, self-reliant

manhood more valuable than all the learning of the schools. Such a guide

was mine, rejoicing in the Scriptural name of Hosea, but commonly

called, in brevity and friendliness, “Hose.”

As we entered Round Lake on this fair morning, its surface was as smooth

and shining as a mirror. It was too early yet for the tide of travel

which sends a score of boats up and down this thoroughfare every day;

and from shore to shore the water was unruffled, except by a flock of

sheldrakes which had been feeding near Plymouth Rock, and now went

skittering off into Weller Bay with a motion between flying and

swimming, leaving a long wake of foam behind them.

At such a time as this you can see the real colour of these Adirondack

lakes. It is not blue, as romantic writers so often describe it, nor

green, like some of those wonderful Swiss lakes; although of course it

reflects the colour of the trees along the shore; and when the wind

stirs it, it gives back the hue of the sky, blue when it is clear, gray

when the clouds are gathering, and sometimes as black as ink under the

shadow of storm. But when it is still, the water itself is like that

river which one of the poets has described as

“_Flowing with a smooth brown current._”

And in this sheet of burnished bronze the mountains and islands were

reflected perfectly, and the sun shone back from it, not in broken

gleams or a wide lane of light, but like a single ball of fire, moving

before us as we moved.

But stop! What is that dark speck on the water, away down toward Turtle

Point? It has just the shape and size of a deer’s head. It seems to move

steadily out into the lake. There is a little ripple, like a wake,

behind it. Hose turns to look at it, and then sends the boat darting in

that direction with long, swift strokes. It is a moment of pleasant

excitement, and we begin to conjecture whether the deer is a buck or a

doe, and whose hounds have driven it in. But when Hose turns to look

again, he slackens his stroke, and says: “I guess we needn’t to hurry;

he won’t get away. It’s astonishin’ what a lot of fun a man can get in

the course of a natural life a-chasin’ chumps of wood.”

We landed on a sand beach at the mouth of a little stream, where a

blazed tree marked the beginning of the Ampersand trail. This line

through the forest was made years ago by that ardent sportsman and lover

of the Adirondacks, Dr. W. W. Ely, of Rochester. Since that time it has

been shortened and improved a little by other travellers, and also not a

little blocked and confused by the lumbermen and the course of Nature.

For when the lumbermen go into the woods, they cut roads in every

direction, leading nowhither, and the unwary wanderer is thereby led

aside from the right way, and entangled in the undergrowth. And as for

Nature, she is entirely opposed to continuance of paths through her

forest. She covers them with fallen leaves, and hides them with thick

bushes. She drops great trees across them, and blots them out with

windfalls. But the blazed line—a succession of broad axe-marks on the

trunks of the trees, just high enough to catch the eye on a level—cannot

be so easily obliterated, and this, after all, is the safest guide

through the woods.

Our trail led us at first through a natural meadow, overgrown with

waist-high grass, and very spongy to the tread. Hornet-haunted also was

this meadow, and therefore no place for idle dalliance or unwary

digression, for the sting of the hornet is one of the saddest and most

humiliating surprises of this mortal life.

Then through a tangle of old wood-roads my guide led me safely, and we

struck one of the long ridges which slope gently from the lake to the

base of the mountain. Here walking was comparatively easy, for in the

hard-wood timber there is little underbrush. The massive trunks seemed

like pillars set to uphold the level roof of green. Great yellow

birches, shaggy with age, stretched their knotted arms high above us;

sugar-maples stood up straight and proud under their leafy crowns; and

smooth beeches—the most polished and park-like of all the forest

trees—offered opportunities for the carving of lovers’ names in a place

where few lovers ever come.

The woods were quiet. It seemed as if all living creatures had deserted

them. Indeed, if you have spent much time in our Northern forests, you

must have often wondered at the sparseness of life, and felt a sense of

pity for the apparent loneliness of the squirrel that chatters at you as

you pass, or the little bird that hops noiselessly about in the

thickets. The midsummer noontide is an especially silent time. The deer

are asleep in some wild meadow. The partridge has gathered her brood for

their midday nap. The squirrels are perhaps counting over their store of

nuts in a hollow tree, and the hermit-thrush spares his voice until

evening. The woods are close—not cool and fragrant as the foolish

romances describe them—but warm and still; for the breeze which sweeps

across the hilltop and ruffles the lake does not penetrate into these

shady recesses, and therefore all the inhabitants take the noontide as

their hour of rest. Only the big woodpecker—he of the scarlet head and

mighty bill—is indefatigable, and somewhere unseen is “tapping the

hollow beechtree,” while a wakeful little bird,—I guess it is the

black-throated green warbler,—prolongs his dreamy, listless

ditty,—_’te-dé-terit-scā,—’te-dé-us-wait_.

After about an hour of easy walking, our trail began to ascend more

sharply. We passed over the shoulder of a ridge and around the edge of a

fire-slash, and then we had the mountain fairly before us. Not that we

could see anything of it, for the woods still shut us in, but the path

became very steep, and we knew that it was a straight climb; not up and

down and round about did this most uncompromising trail proceed, but

right up, in a direct line for the summit.

Now this side of Ampersand is steeper than any Gothic roof I have ever

seen, and withal very much encumbered with rocks and ledges and fallen

trees. There were places where we had to haul ourselves up by roots and

branches, and places where we had to go down on our hands and knees to

crawl under logs. It was breathless work, but not at all dangerous or

difficult. Every step forward was also a step upward; and as we stopped

to rest for a moment, we could see already glimpses of the lake below

us. But at these I did not much care to look, for I think it is a pity

to spoil the surprise of a grand view by taking little snatches of it

beforehand. It is better to keep one’s face set to the mountain, and

then, coming out from the dark forest upon the very summit, feel the

splendour of the outlook flash upon one like a revelation.

The character of the woods through which we were now passing was

entirely different from those of the lower levels. On these steep places

the birch and maple will not grow, or at least they occur but sparsely.

The higher slopes and sharp ridges of the mountains are always covered

with soft-wood timber. Spruce and hemlock and balsam strike their roots

among the rocks, and find a hidden nourishment. They stand close

together; thickets of small trees spring up among the large ones; from

year to year the great trunks are falling one across another, and the

undergrowth is thickening around them, until a spruce forest seems to be

almost impassable. The constant rain of needles and the crumbling of the

fallen trees form a rich, brown mould, into which the foot sinks

noiselessly. Wonderful beds of moss, many feet in thickness, and softer

than feathers, cover the rocks and roots. There are shadows never broken

by the sun, and dark, cool springs of icy water hidden away in the

crevices. You feel a sense of antiquity here which you can never feel

among the maples and birches. Longfellow was right when he filled his

forest primeval with “murmuring pines and hemlocks.”

The higher one climbs, the darker and gloomier and more rugged the

vegetation becomes. The pine-trees soon cease to follow you; the

hemlocks disappear, and the balsams can go no farther. Only the hardy

spruce keeps on bravely, rough and stunted, with branches matted

together and pressed down flat by the weight of the winter’s snow, until

finally, somewhere about the level of four thousand feet above the sea,

even this bold climber gives out, and the weather-beaten rocks of the

summit are clad only with mosses and Alpine plants.

Thus it is with mountains, as perhaps with men, a mark of superior

dignity to be naturally bald.

Ampersand, falling short by a thousand feet of the needful height,

cannot claim this distinction. But what Nature has denied, human labour

has supplied. Under the direction of the Adirondack Survey, some years

ago, several acres of trees were cut from the summit; and when we

emerged, after the last sharp scramble, upon the very crest of the

mountain, we were not shut in by a dense thicket, but stood upon a bare

ridge of granite in the centre of a ragged clearing.

I shut my eyes for a moment, drew a few long breaths of the glorious

breeze, and then looked out upon a wonder and a delight beyond

description.

A soft, dazzling splendour filled the air. Snowy banks and drifts of

cloud were floating slowly over a wide and wondrous land. Vast sweeps of

forest, shining waters, mountains near and far, the deepest green and

the palest blue, changing colours and glancing lights, and all so

silent, so strange, so far away, that it seemed like the landscape of a

dream. One almost feared to speak, lest it should vanish.

Right below us the Lower Saranac and Lonesome Pond, Round Lake and the

Weller Ponds, were spread out like a map. Every point and island was

clearly marked. We could follow the course of the Saranac River in all

its curves and windings, and see the white tents of the haymakers on the

wild meadows. Far away to the northeast stretched the level fields of

Bloomingdale. But westward all was unbroken wilderness, a great sea of

woods as far as the eye could reach. And how far it can reach from a

height like this! What a revelation of the power of sight! That faint

blue outline far in the north was Lyon Mountain, nearly thirty miles

away as the crow flies. Those silver gleams a little nearer were the

waters of St. Regis. The Upper Saranac was displayed in all its length

and breadth, and beyond it the innumerable waters of Fish Creek were

tangled among the dark woods. The long ranges of the hills about the

Jordan bounded the western horizon, and on the southwest Big Tupper Lake

was sleeping at the base of Mount Morris. Looking past the peak of Stony

Creek Mountain, which rose sharp and distinct in a line with Ampersand,

we could trace the path of the Raquette River from the distant waters of

Long Lake down through its far-stretched valley, and catch here and

there a silvery link of its current.

But when we turned to the south and east, how wonderful and how

different was the view! Here was no widespread and smiling landscape

with gleams of silver scattered through it, and soft blue haze resting

upon its fading verge, but a wild land of mountains, stern, rugged,

tumultuous, rising one beyond another like the waves of a stormy

ocean,—Ossa piled upon Pelion,—McIntyre’s sharp peak, and the ragged

crest of the Gothics, and, above all, Marcy’s dome-like head, raised

just far enough above the others to assert his royal right as monarch of

the Adirondacks.

But grandest of all, as seen from this height, was Mount Seward,—a

solemn giant of a mountain, standing apart from the others, and looking

us full in the face. He was clothed from base to summit in a dark,

unbroken robe of forest. _Ou-kor-lah_, the Indians called him—the Great

Eye; and he seemed almost to frown upon us in defiance. At his feet, so

straight below us that it seemed almost as if we could cast a stone into

it, lay the wildest and most beautiful of all the Adirondack

waters—Ampersand Lake.

On its shore, some five-and-twenty years ago, the now almost forgotten

Adirondack Club had their shanty—the successor of “the Philosophers’

Camp” on Follensbee Pond. Agassiz, Appleton, Norton, Emerson, Lowell,

Hoar, Gray, John Holmes, and Stillman, were among the company who made

their resting-place under the shadow of Mount Seward. They had bought a

tract of forest land completely encircling the pond, cut a rough road to

it through the woods, and built a comfortable log cabin, to which they

purposed to return summer after summer. But the civil war broke out,

with all its terrible excitement and confusion of hurrying hosts: the

club existed but for two years, and the little house in the wilderness

was abandoned. In 1878, when I spent three weeks at Ampersand, the cabin

was in ruins, and surrounded by an almost impenetrable growth of bushes.

The only philosophers to be seen were a family of what the guides

quaintly call “quill pigs.” The roof had fallen to the ground;

raspberry-bushes thrust themselves through the yawning crevices between

the logs; and in front of the sunken door-sill lay a rusty, broken iron

stove, like a dismantled altar on which the fire had gone out forever.

After we had feasted upon the view as long as we dared, counted the

lakes and streams, and found that we could see without a glass more than

thirty, and recalled the memories of “good times” which came to us from

almost every point of the compass, we unpacked the camera, and proceeded

to take some pictures.

If you are a photographer, and have anything of the amateur’s passion

for your art, you will appreciate my pleasure and my anxiety. Never

before, so far as I knew, had a camera been set up on Ampersand. I had

but eight plates with me. The views were all very distant and all at a

downward angle. The power of the light at this elevation was an unknown

quantity. And the wind was sweeping vigorously across the open summit of

the mountain. I put in my smallest stop, and prepared for short

exposures.

My instrument was a thing called a Tourograph, which differs from most

other cameras in having the plate-holder on top of the box. The plates

are dropped into a groove below, and then moved into focus, after which

the cap is removed and the exposure made.

I set my instrument for Ampersand Pond, sighted the picture through the

ground glass, and measured the focus. Then I waited for a quiet moment,

dropped the plate, moved it carefully forward to the proper mark, and

went around to take off the cap. I found that I already had it in my

hand, _and the plate had been exposed for about thirty seconds with a

sliding focus_!

I expostulated with myself. I said: “You are excited; you are stupid;

you are unworthy of the name of photographer. Light-writer! You ought to

write with a whitewash-brush!” The reproof was effectual, and from that

moment all went well. The plates dropped smoothly, the camera was

steady, the exposure was correct. Six good pictures were made, to

recall, so far as black and white could do it, the delights of that day.

It has been my good luck to climb many of the peaks of the

Adirondacks—Dix, the Dial, Hurricane, the Giant of the Valley, Marcy,

and Whiteface—but I do not think the outlook from any of them is so

wonderful and lovely as that from little Ampersand; and I reckon among

my most valuable chattels the plates of glass on which the sun has

traced for me (who cannot draw) the outlines of that loveliest

landscape.

The downward journey was swift. We halted for an hour or two beside a

trickling spring, a few rods below the summit, to eat our lunch. Then,

jumping, running, and sometimes sliding, we made the descent, passed in

safety by the dreaded lair of the hornet, and reached Bartlett’s as the

fragrance of the evening pancake was softly diffused through the

twilight. Mark that day, Memory, with a double star in your catalogue!

1885.

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